Findings… :D

POSE! ‘That’s Not Me’ – Mark Ingham

Firstly, in this lecture, I remember that we were asked what was happening in this photograph. I purely guessed that it might be some national air show because of the people’s facial expressions who are looking into the sky. This was a David Burnett‘s photograph which is after camping out for days, tourists look up into the sky as Apollo 11 rocketed into space.

(David Burnett/Contact Press Images)

In the summer of 1969, all eyes turned to a spit of land on Florida’s Atlantic coast—the site of the Kennedy Space Center, named for the president who had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That July, the Apollo 11 mission would attempt just that.

Before 130 years from when Burnett’s picture was taken, View from the Window at Le Gras (1826) is the oldest surviving camera photograph which is created by Nicéphore Niépce in France. This shows like part of castle and actually these are the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras, from a high window. It is regarded to have commenced in 1839.

Enhanced version of Nicéphore Niépce’s View from the Window at Le Gras (1826), the earliest surviving photograph of a scene from nature taken with a camera obscura.

and I researched more details of the camera obscura.

The pinhole camera and camera obscura principle illustrated in 1925, in The Boy Scientist.

In 1838, Boulevard du Temple contains the earliest known candid photograph of a person which is taken by Louis Daguerre in Paris. In this picture, the moving traffic on the street does not appear for their images to be captured since it used the over ten-minute exposure time.

The lecture is skipped forward to the Victorian era, and Victorian portraits are showed us and the images looks bizarre since these include a hidden something covered with fabric. Their mother or someone disguised as chairs or camouflaged behind them.

During Victorian era, most of portraits elicited people’s stiff postures and unsmiling faces with controlled mouth because these are taken long exposure time. So, people needed to keep same gesture in order to be captured. However, the pictures of Victorian children included dead siblings for photographs as if they looked alive. This tradition of portraits was mementos for the deceased with family since the infant mortality rate was high. I thought that photographing was not easy things to get without social and financial condition so when their child was died, probably they might want to remain memorable photographs rather than photographing alive children.

The first selfie!!!!!

The earliest known photographic self-portrait was taken by Robert Cornelius who is an American pioneer in photography produced a daguerreotype by himself in 1839. Also this is one of the first photographs of a person. It was scratched in order to remove camera. The back reads, “The first light picture ever taken.”

This photograph is Danish prime minister Thorning-Schmidt’s selfie with President Obama and British prime minister Cameron featured on front pages around the world. While they looked delighted to be at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service, the US first lady looked distinctly unimpressed in the background. Even though they were in the memorial service, ordinary selfies seem to make them lose all sense of decency.